The Music of Chopin

by Jim Samson

Overview

The lasting popularity of Chopin's music has reached "from salon to slum." He captured and expressed the spirit of the age of Romanticism, its ardour and idealism, its longing and restlessness, its love of spontaneity, with an authority his contemporaries immediately recognized and which successive generations have admired and loved. Much of the Chopin literature in English is biographical, but this book is a critical study of the music itself and of the creative process which is central to the life of any composer. Samson provides a detailed analysis of the style and structure of the music in the light of recent Chopin scholarship on the one hand and recent analytical methods on the other. The early chapters deal mainly with the sources and the characteristic profile of Chopin's musical style, relating his music to a wider context in social and stylistic history. Later chapters look rather at the structure of his music and how it functions, with many examples highlighting the discussion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198164029
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	03/24/1994
Series:	Clarendon Paperbacks
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	9.21(w) x 6.20(h) x 0.71(d)
Lexile:	1570L (what's this?)

About the Author

Author of numerous books on Chopin and one of the foremost Chopin scholars in the world, Jim Samson is Professor of Musicology at the University of Exeter.

Editorial Reviews

"The first serious study of Chopin's oeuvre to appear in English; thus it fills a real need and it will probably remain a standard reference work for some years to come."—Music Analysis

"Chopin's whole relationship to the nineteenth-century cult of virtuosity, and his transmutation of a salon art into the poetic, is perceptively described."—Times Literary Supplement

"A work of impressive scholarship....The writing is vigorous and lucid."—Music Teacher

From the Publisher